On the playing WoW single player thing: well, yes, of course. If anything, I am saying that is going to become MORE common, because more of the formerly single-player games will push towards that play pattern.
I don't think single-player games are going to completely go away. I think they are going to increasingly get nested inside multiplayer contexts, until it will get hard to find ones that aren't. But we'll always have our instances.:)
So, empirically, a lot of people ARE (btw, EEDAR just did an interesting study on achievements, if you haven't seen the articles). Heck, the silly Burger King games turned into hits in large part thanks to achievements.
Note, the fact that I think the industry is going this way doesn't mean that I necessarily LIKE it. It's just the trend that I see.
I was the original lead, but Trammel was AFTER my time. I left in late 98 or early 99. Second Age was mine and about the year after that, but not Renaissance.
The Austin Game Developers group is not the same thing as the Austin Game Conference. The AGD meets periodically and holds discussions like this; the AGC happens annually and is a for-profit conference.
The most practical reason is because diversity in the development teams leads to diversity of subjects in the games, which then potentially leads to larger audiences for games.
Games like Dance Dance Revolution, Katamari Damacy, SimCity, and so on appear because people who aren't like the current game developers, people who aren't interested in the same old things, end up controlling a project.
These then may well result in larger revenues, and larger cultural relevance, for games in general. As well as more kinds of games to play for everyone.
Again, I think you are missing the point.
I am not arguing against games, far from it.
But even today, the largest, most successful virtual world is not WoW. It's Habbo Hotel.
Let's not be blinkered by our personal preference for games; games kick ass, I wrote a whole book about how and why. But online worlds are not just games.
Yeah, a lot of the info on there is very basic. That would be because the article dates from 1998, and is mostly gathered from stuff predating that, such as games on the online services, MUDs, and Habitat. Players and developers both have gotten a bit more sophisticated since then--once upon a time some of this stuff was really eye-opening.;)
Online worlds encompass game worlds like EQ and WoW, social worlds like There.com and Habbo Hotel, user-created worlds like Second Life and Furcadia, educational worlds like MOOse Crossing and military training sims, research-oriented worlds like MediaMOO, and much more. Thinking that they are all games is exactly the point of this law.
Online worlds are a PLATFORM first and foremost. Putting games in that platform is certainly one of the top things you can do, and if you do so, you had better make sure those games are fun, certainly. But it's also not that hard to make an online world that has a fun game in it and yet ignores the other factors of worldness, community, and service, and have a disaster on your hands--there's plenty of examples of that.
I've made the politician comparison myself many many times, so I don't cringe at it at all.:)
That tension is interesting, though. We are, in the end, entertainers as well as politicians. Something like the post above is decrying the entertainment value (I think) not the management as such. At least, that's the way I generally read it.
I won't pin blame for failings of SWG on the players, nor will I take credit for its many successes (which posters like the above tend to overlook). What's interesting to me is that there's such a desire to pin blame, and such vitriol attached to it.
I must say, I have always been fascinated by the different behaviors taken by game fans towards game creators than by fans of other media's relationship to entertainers in other media. Nobody says that Stephen King is a retard because he screwed up an alien invasion novel--I mean, how easy a home run is that? Clearly, we should never listen to a word he says again. Besides, he bears sole responsibility for what he did, it's not like there was a team writing the book.
I'm not whining or being defensive here--I really do find it curious. I suppose it's derailing the thread, but why is it that gamers behave in this different way? Is it because of greater passion? The illusion of greater knowledge about the entertainer? The illusion of greater understanding of the process? Why is the rant considered to be one of the highest forms of game critique?
The MMO servers I have seen run anywhere from 100ms to 250ms frame times. They all amortize CPU load across multiple frames, of course, to keep player responsiveness as high as possible. So as load increases, AI is usually the first thing to get deprioritized. 250ms seems to be the slowest you really want to run an MMO server at.
All the optimizations you cited are pretty standard. In addition, there's a lot of preset paths, use of client-side steering (in other words, only making it LOOK like the creature avoided the bush), and more.
Everybody basically uses A* or variants thereof. The issue is that the environments have gotten more complex (bigger and more detailed graphs to search), the behaviors demanded by consumers have gotten more complex, and there's just plain more AIs to run.
BTW, the comment was largely MMO specific. As such, the pathfinding is happening on the server, not on the client computers. You buying a faster computer won't help much.;)
You're missing the point... it's about cost of development, not about the hours alone. The reason why the MMOG content tends to be more basic than the stuff in a single player game is because the manhours spent to develop one hour of content are radically different in the two games. Single-player games can invest more in a given hour of gameplay, basically. In the more polished games like Half-Life 2, there's weeks spent on a single MINUTE of gameplay. MMOs, because of the extended play time that people demand from them, must supply more content, and by necessity it gets stretched thin.
This is going to get much worse with time--EA has publicly mentioned teams of 200+ for next generation sports titles, and how many hours of content does Madden have, really?
In the long run, this is not a good trendline for the industry. Not only will it lead to more overwork and quality of life issues like the ones that came to the forefront this year, but it will also cause budgets to continue to rise. As they rise, you're going to see a few effects:
the required sales figures for break even may push prices up
the high sales figures required for break-even will force blockbuster titles to greater conservatism
more publisher consolidation as those who cannot afford the price tag get swallowed up
a greater emphasis on hit-driven business, potentially leading to fewer choices for consumers
You will probably also see some other effects:
More indie shops bypassing publishers altogether. Not everyone will be able to pull off what Valve did with Steam, however.
The continuation of the flight of developers from console and AAA development and towards casual games and indie games (a major trend in the last few years)
Extrapolate from the film industry if they had to keep reinventing the camera every year, because that sort of Hollywoodish business model is what we're talking about here.
The solutions I put forth are hardly unique to me, by the way. They're the underlying point behind what Will is doing with Spore, for example.
The way I phrase it in the book (this is from memory) is that the easiest way to get past a challenge in a game is not to play... so I don't think we are actually in significant disagreement. There was substantially more text that went along with the statement on cheating than just that one sentence.:)
When you say you'd rather see the ending than keep plowing through the game levels, that's exactly the sort of "choosing a different battlefield" that I mean.
I've said publicly many times that "levels suck." I don't like them--specifically, I don't like them when they are a means of granting people power, as opposed to measuring achievement. They are, however, a convention that a lot of players DO like and find fun and rewarding. People like the feeling of getting more and more power as they advance.
So I'm with you philosophically, but I'm also not blind to the desires of the market.
Well, just as you don't bring a knife to a gunfight, don't bring a gun to a knife fight. That would be a space with very tight quarters that rewarded stealth.
In the wide open spaces of SWG, there proved to be next to no knife fights, but I do think the principle that different weapons are good in different situations is valid.
I'd also point out that SWg was designed so that you DON'T define yourself strictly as one thing or another.
Er, no, that's not what I said. I'm always amazed at how reductionist paraphrasing can make me look bad.;)
I said (in simplest form) that in a zero sum game dependent on skill, the better players end up with most of the wins (duh). I said that in a a non-zero-sum game, if extremely high skill is required to advance, then only the best will reach the top (duh). And I said that treadmills (defined as "game systems that reward perseverance rather than skill") allow players who aren't experts at something to reach the high end content.
This latter one led me to conclude that treadmills aren't a bad thing in a multiplayer game, since they are effectively handicapping players who are not as expert.
FWIW, in the book, I say "not requiring player skill in a game is a cardinal sin in game design." I'm not at all a fan of grinds or repetitive treadmills.
I'm proud of making the following things be key parts of the MMO experience, or things that IMHO point the way for future development of MMOs. Yes, many of them existed in muds, but even in muds a lot of them were not common.
- crafting
- player cities
- pets (more Tamagotchi-style than just summonies charmies)
- player housing
- enough freedom of expression to support things like player-written books, in-game theater troupes, and so on
- TRYING to solve the problems inherent in allowing player freedom
- bringing together many playstyles in one game
- some of what we did in terms of events
- no level
- no classes
Stuff I'd do over if I could:
- #1 with a bullet, player freedoms causing playerkilling and it getting totally out of control, and being blind/stubborn to what players were saying about it. There's a thing on my website about that, if you care to read it, "a UO postmortem of sorts"
- complete lack of emphasis on traditional questing-style content
- not following through on things (necromancy, townstones)
FWIW, I was creative lead for the original UO release, and was on Live for two more years after that. I left before the Trammel/Felucca split.
I wanted to point out that the book has a website, with a blog with extended commentary and the PDF presentation that originally led to the book. It can be found at http://www.theoryoffun.com.
As regards some of the critiques about myself or my work posted... I've said before that I wrote this book as an effort to get back to basics.
FWIW, though, a lot of people have incorrect impressions about what I did on what titles, and when I was on them and when not.:) I'm far from being perfect, but some of the comments credit me with stuff I didn't do, blame me for stuff I didn't do, don't credit me for stuff I did do, and don't blame me for some things that probably should be considered my fault. That's life, I suppose, but if anyone has questions on those fronts, I'd be happy to clarify them here.
...and I've come to regard this as being similar to the person who says that choreography == dance. It doesn't, of course. The art of choreography is all about the movement of bodies, the stillness and the action, the timing and the relative position. The art of the dance, however, is choreography + costuming + music + staging + lighting +... you get the idea.
Can you take an identically choreographed dance and place it in a different setting with different costumes and have it be just as valid, just as "good"? Yes, of course. But the audience experience includes the whole of the performance, not just the choreography. To exclude the fact that the dance happens on a happy field of flowers versus inside a concentration camp is to miss key elements of examining the user experience as a whole.
Now, the narratologists are just as likely to make the mistake from the other side.:)
The difficulty arises from the term "game" which we use to both refer to the formal construction of rules, and the whole experience. To be more precise, we could say that Aarseth as a ludologist is like a choreographer in that he is interested in the formal construction of rules. There's a field for those who study "game rules" and a field for those who study "interactive entertainment" and one encompasses the other to a large degree. The latter one will be pretty broad (but not confine itself to narratology).
Slashdot Mirror
On the playing WoW single player thing: well, yes, of course. If anything, I am saying that is going to become MORE common, because more of the formerly single-player games will push towards that play pattern. I don't think single-player games are going to completely go away. I think they are going to increasingly get nested inside multiplayer contexts, until it will get hard to find ones that aren't. But we'll always have our instances. :)
So, empirically, a lot of people ARE (btw, EEDAR just did an interesting study on achievements, if you haven't seen the articles). Heck, the silly Burger King games turned into hits in large part thanks to achievements. Note, the fact that I think the industry is going this way doesn't mean that I necessarily LIKE it. It's just the trend that I see.
I was the original lead, but Trammel was AFTER my time. I left in late 98 or early 99. Second Age was mine and about the year after that, but not Renaissance.
in that TerraNova thread, but rather on the whole thought of the 3d Web. In fact, that's what most of the discussion was about, not SL in specific.
-Raph
The only bits that are mine in that article are the bits in [[]]. Everything else was Bill. So the comment about convergence is not me but Bill Roper.
The Austin Game Developers group is not the same thing as the Austin Game Conference. The AGD meets periodically and holds discussions like this; the AGC happens annually and is a for-profit conference.
The most practical reason is because diversity in the development teams leads to diversity of subjects in the games, which then potentially leads to larger audiences for games. Games like Dance Dance Revolution, Katamari Damacy, SimCity, and so on appear because people who aren't like the current game developers, people who aren't interested in the same old things, end up controlling a project. These then may well result in larger revenues, and larger cultural relevance, for games in general. As well as more kinds of games to play for everyone.
Again, I think you are missing the point. I am not arguing against games, far from it. But even today, the largest, most successful virtual world is not WoW. It's Habbo Hotel. Let's not be blinkered by our personal preference for games; games kick ass, I wrote a whole book about how and why. But online worlds are not just games.
Yeah, a lot of the info on there is very basic. That would be because the article dates from 1998, and is mostly gathered from stuff predating that, such as games on the online services, MUDs, and Habitat. Players and developers both have gotten a bit more sophisticated since then--once upon a time some of this stuff was really eye-opening. ;)
Online worlds encompass game worlds like EQ and WoW, social worlds like There.com and Habbo Hotel, user-created worlds like Second Life and Furcadia, educational worlds like MOOse Crossing and military training sims, research-oriented worlds like MediaMOO, and much more. Thinking that they are all games is exactly the point of this law.
Online worlds are a PLATFORM first and foremost. Putting games in that platform is certainly one of the top things you can do, and if you do so, you had better make sure those games are fun, certainly. But it's also not that hard to make an online world that has a fun game in it and yet ignores the other factors of worldness, community, and service, and have a disaster on your hands--there's plenty of examples of that.
I've made the politician comparison myself many many times, so I don't cringe at it at all. :)
That tension is interesting, though. We are, in the end, entertainers as well as politicians. Something like the post above is decrying the entertainment value (I think) not the management as such. At least, that's the way I generally read it.
I won't pin blame for failings of SWG on the players, nor will I take credit for its many successes (which posters like the above tend to overlook). What's interesting to me is that there's such a desire to pin blame, and such vitriol attached to it.
I'm not whining or being defensive here--I really do find it curious. I suppose it's derailing the thread, but why is it that gamers behave in this different way? Is it because of greater passion? The illusion of greater knowledge about the entertainer? The illusion of greater understanding of the process? Why is the rant considered to be one of the highest forms of game critique?
All the optimizations you cited are pretty standard. In addition, there's a lot of preset paths, use of client-side steering (in other words, only making it LOOK like the creature avoided the bush), and more.
Everybody basically uses A* or variants thereof. The issue is that the environments have gotten more complex (bigger and more detailed graphs to search), the behaviors demanded by consumers have gotten more complex, and there's just plain more AIs to run. BTW, the comment was largely MMO specific. As such, the pathfinding is happening on the server, not on the client computers. You buying a faster computer won't help much. ;)
- the required sales figures for break even may push prices up
- the high sales figures required for break-even will force blockbuster titles to greater conservatism
- more publisher consolidation as those who cannot afford the price tag get swallowed up
- a greater emphasis on hit-driven business, potentially leading to fewer choices for consumers
You will probably also see some other effects:- More indie shops bypassing publishers altogether. Not everyone will be able to pull off what Valve did with Steam, however.
- The continuation of the flight of developers from console and AAA development and towards casual games and indie games (a major trend in the last few years)
Extrapolate from the film industry if they had to keep reinventing the camera every year, because that sort of Hollywoodish business model is what we're talking about here. The solutions I put forth are hardly unique to me, by the way. They're the underlying point behind what Will is doing with Spore, for example.I was not, in fact, the creator of EverQuest. Another factually incorrect tidbit in Slashdot comments (*gasp*, can it be?)...
When you say you'd rather see the ending than keep plowing through the game levels, that's exactly the sort of "choosing a different battlefield" that I mean.
So I'm with you philosophically, but I'm also not blind to the desires of the market.
Well, just as you don't bring a knife to a gunfight, don't bring a gun to a knife fight. That would be a space with very tight quarters that rewarded stealth.
In the wide open spaces of SWG, there proved to be next to no knife fights, but I do think the principle that different weapons are good in different situations is valid.
I'd also point out that SWg was designed so that you DON'T define yourself strictly as one thing or another.
I was on UO from the beginning, so if you liked UO early on, that was me. I left before UO: Renaissance though.
Er, no, that's not what I said. I'm always amazed at how reductionist paraphrasing can make me look bad. ;)
I said (in simplest form) that in a zero sum game dependent on skill, the better players end up with most of the wins (duh). I said that in a a non-zero-sum game, if extremely high skill is required to advance, then only the best will reach the top (duh). And I said that treadmills (defined as "game systems that reward perseverance rather than skill") allow players who aren't experts at something to reach the high end content.
This latter one led me to conclude that treadmills aren't a bad thing in a multiplayer game, since they are effectively handicapping players who are not as expert.
FWIW, in the book, I say "not requiring player skill in a game is a cardinal sin in game design." I'm not at all a fan of grinds or repetitive treadmills.
In the book I in fact say that they are INseparable. :)
I'm proud of making the following things be key parts of the MMO experience, or things that IMHO point the way for future development of MMOs. Yes, many of them existed in muds, but even in muds a lot of them were not common. - crafting - player cities - pets (more Tamagotchi-style than just summonies charmies) - player housing - enough freedom of expression to support things like player-written books, in-game theater troupes, and so on - TRYING to solve the problems inherent in allowing player freedom - bringing together many playstyles in one game - some of what we did in terms of events - no level - no classes Stuff I'd do over if I could: - #1 with a bullet, player freedoms causing playerkilling and it getting totally out of control, and being blind/stubborn to what players were saying about it. There's a thing on my website about that, if you care to read it, "a UO postmortem of sorts" - complete lack of emphasis on traditional questing-style content - not following through on things (necromancy, townstones) FWIW, I was creative lead for the original UO release, and was on Live for two more years after that. I left before the Trammel/Felucca split.
Thanks for the review, Zonk!
:) I'm far from being perfect, but some of the comments credit me with stuff I didn't do, blame me for stuff I didn't do, don't credit me for stuff I did do, and don't blame me for some things that probably should be considered my fault. That's life, I suppose, but if anyone has questions on those fronts, I'd be happy to clarify them here.
I wanted to point out that the book has a website, with a blog with extended commentary and the PDF presentation that originally led to the book. It can be found at http://www.theoryoffun.com.
As regards some of the critiques about myself or my work posted... I've said before that I wrote this book as an effort to get back to basics.
FWIW, though, a lot of people have incorrect impressions about what I did on what titles, and when I was on them and when not.
...and I've come to regard this as being similar to the person who says that choreography == dance. It doesn't, of course. The art of choreography is all about the movement of bodies, the stillness and the action, the timing and the relative position. The art of the dance, however, is choreography + costuming + music + staging + lighting + ... you get the idea.
:)
Can you take an identically choreographed dance and place it in a different setting with different costumes and have it be just as valid, just as "good"? Yes, of course. But the audience experience includes the whole of the performance, not just the choreography. To exclude the fact that the dance happens on a happy field of flowers versus inside a concentration camp is to miss key elements of examining the user experience as a whole.
Now, the narratologists are just as likely to make the mistake from the other side.
The difficulty arises from the term "game" which we use to both refer to the formal construction of rules, and the whole experience. To be more precise, we could say that Aarseth as a ludologist is like a choreographer in that he is interested in the formal construction of rules. There's a field for those who study "game rules" and a field for those who study "interactive entertainment" and one encompasses the other to a large degree. The latter one will be pretty broad (but not confine itself to narratology).